You and Me

You And Me is an interesting experiment which falls way short in execution, but still is an interesting view.

The closest American film I could compare it to is Al Jolson's Hallelujah I'm a Bum which utilized that same sing/talk rhythmic technique in many spots. Rodgers&Hart's efforts were not as butchered as Kurt Weill's were, my guess is that Paramount got cold feet and tried to salvage the film as they saw it by making it more of a typical gangster yarn.

The story involves Harry Carey who as part of his payback to society hires freshly paroled convicts in his department store. The presumption is that he does screen them for employment.

George Raft is one of those ex-convicts hired there and he meets and falls for Sylvia Sidney. She knows about him, but he doesn't know she is also on parole. Other prison pals working for Carey are, George E. Stone, Warren Hymer, Jack Pennick, Robert Cummings and Roscoe Karns.

One very unregenerated crook, Barton MacLane, tries to get the whole crew of them to help knock over the store. What happens is the rest of the plot of the film.

Perhaps You and Me might have been better done elsewhere. I'm thinking of Warner Brothers who specialized in these working class stories. Barton MacLane, George E. Stone, and Warren Hymer certainly all were part of Warner's gangster stable and George Raft moved to Warner Brothers himself a year after You and Me came out. Paramount just didn't go in for stories like these and the results show.

Highlight of the film is Sylvia Sidney giving a lecture in economics about how crime doesn't pay. For heist guys like these when you deduct the expenses of a job, it really doesn't pay. Only the folks at the top really make out.

By the way you might call what Kurt Weill tried to do musically and Fritz Lang brought to the screen as one long rap music video. You and Me may have been way too soon ahead of its time.

Still it's probably worth a look if for no other reason than to see a joint collaborative effort of two expatriates from the Nazi regime, Kurt Weill and Fritz Lang.

The gang of directors that came across to Hollywood from Germany fleeing nazi persecution were a very mixed bunch, but they all had one thing in common. They were all used to a higher degree of artistic licence and stylisation than was the given in tinsel town. Once in a while though, and especially in those early days, one of them would turn out something a little truer to the old form. Fritz Lang was among the most distinctive and also unfairly maligned of these refugee directors, but You and Me was one of a small number of American pictures which he produced as well as directed and thus was able to imbue it with his own particular brand of art deco comic book oddity.

Lang's late silent pictures tended to be very rhythmic, and You and Me is a good demonstration of where he was able to take that strand in the sound era. While certainly no typical musical, it has a number of songs and abstract interludes which lift us out of reality whilst still commenting on it, all illustrated with Lang's most baroque shot compositions, and scored by no less a personage than Kurt Weill (he wrote Mack the Knife, you know). "Operatic" is an overused term in cinema, but with its emphatic staging and numbers that dip in and out of regular dialogue, You and Me is certainly reminiscent of the opera at many points. The screenplay is by Virginia van Upp from a story by Norman Krasna, in which an unlikely tale of love among ex-convicts is surrounded by a deliberate distillation of gangster movie clichés, in rather blunt caricatures such as a mob boss known only as "big shot". All this itself feeds into the picture's surreal and, yes, operatic setting.

In this light, lead man George Raft can be viewed as simply another part of standard gangster movie furniture. You certainly wouldn't hire Raft for his acting abilities, since while his name would require an additional two letters to become "rafter", his lack of talent already renders him a wooden beam. It is also very much like Lang the producer to take on players who had strange and distinctive faces, which is why we get supporting acts from people like Warren Hymer and Jack Pennick, certainly worthy comic performers but appearing here mainly for effect. There are some great dramatic performances though. Sylvia Sidney is a likable leading lady, and her dewy-eyed adoration for Raft seems very real, as does her shrewdness in the final showdown. There are also smaller parts for the delightful Vera Gordon and the stern and steady Harry Carey, perhaps the most prestigious name on the cast list.

But Lang's style as a director was not really centred upon actors. It was however a functional one and not purely stylisation as is sometimes supposed. Lang's fascination with stark angles and geometric arrangements in his shot compositions are only really exaggerated examples of the visual tricks all competent directors use. In Raft and Sidney's proposal scene at the bus depot, he frames them with a set of lines converging at their head. It creates an optical illusion that makes us feel they should move towards each other. Lang forms unrecognisably bizarre patterns out of everyday objects, for example making rows of boxes in a storeroom look like some art deco wall panel, and while undoubtedly a bit of stylistic indulgence it also helps to highlight an important moment between two characters.

Many of Lang's little baroque touches, such as those shadowy close-ups of characters staring straight into the lens, would be frankly a bit of a distraction in a regular drama. But that is why they make sense here, in this stereotyped world of hammy gangsters and booming voices singing songs about stealing. It's a kind of overt form of cinema that allows the corniest of stories to be dressed up and brought to life, and surreal as it is it works surprisingly well as entertainment. However, genres were rigid and incorruptible things then, and you weren't supposed to merge gritty realism with musical flights of fancy. Besides, the semi-musical format would have been regarded as an awkward leftover from the early talkie days. As such, You and Me remains very much a one-off curio.

What a fascinating little film, on a variety of levels. There is an expressionism that would have made Elmer Rice proud as well as a distinctly European approach. It feels as if it could be either a German product or from much earlier in the '30s when Hollywood was still in an experimental phase of self-discovery. There is nothing quite like it out there.

This is pure Fritz Lang, coupled perfectly with Charles Lang Jr.'s photography, with Kurt Weill's music jumping in abruptly to make you catch your breath. The blend of comedy and drama is smooth.

The plot line is familiar to this cast. A businessman makes a point of hiring parolees at his department store, where some are clearly having trouble adjusting. Joe has abided by the strict demands of his parole and his time is at last up, freeing him to marry Helen. But she has never told him that she too is an ex-con and still has several months of parole to serve. She has to tell lie upon lie to cover up the secret. Meanwhile, his old gang is nipping at him to join up again in another heist scheme.

Not for the last time, the film exposes the difficulties of staying straight, difficulties arising both from the system itself as well as peer pressure.

Some plot points are similar to Pick-up, a George Raft-Sylvia Sidney film of a few years earlier, but this story is much stronger. At this time Raft was in the middle of a five-year era when he was at his best - relaxed and in character, willingly joining in the sometimes unusual proceedings. Sidney is beautifully sympathetic as a criminal, always hoping two wrongs will make a right. What a one-of-a-kind screen presence she was. Her work with Raft always seems like two pals getting together again. That makes the wedding night sequence and the around-the-world honeymoon all the more entertaining.

The rest of the cast, from wonderful Harry Carey to cynical Roscoe Karns, turns in strong, imaginative performances. As odd as some moments might be, everyone is clearly "in on" Lang's vision.

There is a great scene of the gang reminiscing about their prison days that displays that vision full force. This is what the film is all about.

This is one of the best film starring George Raft. Many character actors also show up at different parts of the films such as Greta Granstedt, Ellen Drew, George E. Stone, Bob Cummings, Barton MacLane, and others. Although the film gets a bit campy at times, this is first class entertainment. And Sylvia Sidney is a real peach !!!

I am a great fan of the late director Fritz Lang. My very favorite film from him is the science fiction classic "Metropolis". A close second is "Frau I'm Monde". Other great films are "M", "Woman in the Window", and "1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse". This film with the music of Kurt Weill and the way the various characters are developed in the context of the modern workplace and the struggle to find happiness and thrive in a fast-paced society makes this one of Fritz Lang's best dramas.

Dan Basinger

That doesn't fit with what most people think about Fritz Lang. He's generally a tragedian at this point in his career. You and Me is very similar in subject to his previous film, You Only Live Once, about an ex-con who can't get a break. Here, George Raft plays an ex-con working at a department store. Sylvia Sidney is his girlfriend. She also works at the store, and she has a secret: she's an ex-con, too. Raft has a bitter double standard and despises female ex-cons, so Sidney can't tell him the truth.

Near the beginning, the film seems a bit clunky. The opening is kind of goofy, and, it being a Lang film, you might be confused about how you should take it. His other films aren't completely without comedy. Few films refuse to give us at least a couple of laughs along the way, perhaps close to the beginning. But You and Me just keeps getting sillier.

I was finally won over by an extraordinarily stylistic sequence where a mob of criminals recall their days in jail with a musical number. After that enormously entertaining sequence had come and gone, I knew that anything could go. In fact, anything can go and does. The film ends up being one of the most original films ever made. No comedy is like this. You know, I don't want to swear to this, but You and Me is perhaps my favorite Fritz Lang film. I actually haven't seen any masterpiece (i.e., 10/10s) from him, including Metropolis and M. You and Me, like M and Fury, my other two favorites, gets a 9/10.